Fridays for Frida: An old woman, a broken world and a new spark of hope

By Claus Mikosch

"Fridays for Frida" is a story about responsibility, joy and change; about the destruction of nature and the power of those who have the courage to see things for what they are. With each day, more people find that courage - first they worry, then they hope and finally they act. Frida is one of them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Release date: Mar 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9783753468136

Claus Mikosch

Claus Mikosch wurde Mitte der siebziger Jahre in Mönchengladbach geboren und pendelt heute als Autor und Filmemacher zwischen Deutschland und Spanien. Mit seinen Geschichten über den kleinen Buddha ist ihm ein außergewöhnlicher Erfolg gelungen. Mehr Infos @ www.clausmikosch.com

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1. Bad News

The storm raged outside. The driving rain raced through the air and fat droplets pattered against the window. On the street below, a delivery van drove through a deep puddle at a snail’s pace with his windscreen wipers on the highest setting; a young man flitted across the pavement, desperately trying to control his umbrella. Dark clouds swallowed up most of the daylight and loud thunder regularly drowned out the wind’s lashes.

Frida sat next to the round kitchen table in her small flat, nursing a cup of tea and staring out of the window lost in thought. Frida was 82 years old, had no pets and didn’t own a car or a bicycle.

She used to work as an English teacher at a grammar school. She had liked her job and saw it as a privilege and a special challenge to teach young people the beauty and power of language. If it had been up to her, she would have carried on working for a number of years but the law spoke against it. Very strange, these laws that prohibited a passionate teacher from working.

Her life as a pensioner was quite unspectacular. She spent most of her time alone in her one-bedroom apartment on the third floor. Her age was starting to take its toll – her back was often tired and ached, her knee pinched and even the slightest of colds had her bedridden for days on end. She had always spent a lot of time in town, in cafes, with friends or at the theatre, but over the course of the years she had become more and more withdrawn. Thanks to her fancy tablet and supermarkets offering an easy online delivery service, she didn’t even have to leave the house to go shopping. She had made herself comfortable at home.

A few big twigs flew across the street and a flash of lightning lit up the sky in the distance. Frida sipped at her tea and sighed. She would have loved to go outside and dance in the rain. She wasn’t in the mood for a cold, though, nor did she want to run the risk of possibly slipping and falling. And, besides, she had never seen an old lady dancing in the rain before. Perhaps it just wasn’t appropriate. If only she were young again, just for a few moments.

At least her eyesight hadn’t abandoned her yet, for which she was very grateful. This allowed her to continue nurturing her love for language by reading books. And Frida read a lot of books, she was a real bookworm. It didn’t matter to her whether it was a sad or a happy story, a crime novel, a classic or even a children’s book – she just loved gliding along with the sentences, seeing the words dance and getting lost in another’s world of thoughts. She had already started devouring books when she was a little girl, and her mother had always joked that she fed on letters more than she did on food. At her age especially, reading was a marvellous gift because her books kept her spirits moving, even though she got out a lot less these days. Each printed page set her off on a journey of thoughts and gave her the chance to discover new things and to forget her loneliness and pain for a while. Let alone the catastrophic state of the world.

Loud thunder made her windows shake. It was immediately followed by a second thunderclap. The storm tore at branches and the torrential rain pelted against the window panes. Frida set her half-empty cup down on the table and turned on the radio. She liked listening to the radio and would have done so more often if it weren’t for the constant stream of bad news.

As has been the case in recent years, this late summer sees enormous areas of the Amazon burning, the radio presenter announced soberly. The Brazilian government has promised to increase firefighting efforts. This devastating report was promptly followed by, Football: on the fourth matchday of the…

Frida turned the radio off again and fell back into her chair, shaking her head. She was stunned by how common these horrific news events had become. The lungs of the Earth were burning and, yet, the topic of football was discussed with the next breath. Shouldn’t people just drop everything right there on the spot upon hearing that the Earth’s lungs were on fire? Frida just couldn’t understand, or maybe she didn’t want to understand.

And after all, the burning rainforest wasn’t the only serious problem the Earth faced. The Arctic was burning too. The Arctic! Too much coal and oil was still being burnt on a daily basis, with horrific consequences for the air we all breathe and the climate we all live in. The consumerist and packaging craze had led to containers full of rubbish shipping around the world only to pollute land and water elsewhere. Rivers were being poisoned, forests killed and mountains violated; innocent people were drowning, polar bears were starving and children were dying of thirst. Add to that numerous bloody conflicts, the rise of racism, life-threatening epidemics, increasing poverty and growing fear. What was happening to the world?

Of course there had been wars and natural catastrophes in the past, too, Frida was aware of that; but the scale of destruction seemed to increase with each passing year. In the meantime, humans were no longer just a threat to their immediate neighbours, but to the living beings of the entire planet!

For Frida, the news channels reporting on global horrors 24 hours a day were the worst. The world’s drama had taken on the format of a never-ending entertainment programme. Fortunately Frida didn’t watch a lot of television, especially those kinds of channels. Nevertheless, she was well aware of the sad reality. A reality that was becoming clearer with every year, with every day, by the hour: the world was broken.

As the next thunder rumbled, Frida got up to get some ointment for her pinching knee. Back in the kitchen, she filled her teacup and sank back into her chair. She rolled up her trouser leg and began massaging the soothing cream into her knee.

If only there were a healing salve for the ailing world, she thought. She would gently massage it into our Earth, as much as needed, any time of day or night. But there was no such miracle balm, not that she knew of, anyway. It left her feeling completely helpless against the destruction of the environment. She found herself increasingly worried – about that little bit of future still awaiting her, and more so about the livelihood of those who still had a lot of time left on this Earth. She would love nothing more than to help turn things around or at least make them better. But how was that supposed to work? What was one single, old lady going to change? Nothing.

When she had finished treating her knee, Frida rested the teacup in her hand and let her eyes wander to the scenes outside her window.

The storm raged on.

2. Looking Away

The next morning, the wind had dropped and it had stopped raining. Here and there, a few rays of sunlight even managed to find small gaps to shine through a blanket of clouds. Frida decided to have breakfast on the balcony. It wasn’t all that big, but there was enough space for a foldaway table and two wooden chairs. One chair would have been enough as she rarely had visitors, but Frida enjoyed the empty chair’s company. Sometimes she’d imagine her husband sitting next to her and looking up at the sky with her. He had passed away a long time ago,